First few paragraphs:
Thanksgiving hits a little different in the middle of a national unity crisis. Like millions of Canadians, I am particularly thankful for the renewed sense of patriotism and Canadian pride I’ve seen throughout my city, across the province and from coast to coast to coast. As I told the friends and family gathered around my dinner table this weekend, we have Donald Trump and Danielle Smith to thank for that national reawakening. Now, in the same spirit, it’s time to thank Elon Musk for reminding us of the need to develop our own sovereign technology and data ecosystem — and the cost of remaining so reliant on the one he runs.
“Quebec should separate,” he wrote in a recent post on his social media site. “They would be better off. Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate too.” This isn’t at all surprising coming from someone who has said that “Canada isn’t a real country” and who routinely makes his antipathy toward our government and its leadership clear. What is surprising, and becomes more so with each passing insult, is the number of high-profile Canadian politicians, journalists and business leaders who continue to patronize his site.
It’s not just Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and Jamil Jivani who seem to enjoy swimming in X’s soup of misinformation, anti-immigrant hatred and foreign influence operations. Senior federal Liberal ministers like François-Philippe Champagne, Marc Miller and Evan Solomon post content routinely on Musk’s site — and barely ever do so on more progressive-leaning platforms like Bluesky. High-profile journalists, including Althia Raj, Andrew Coyne, Chantal Hebert and Rosemary Barton, also can’t seem to quit the place. Even left-wing political leaders like David Eby and Avi Lewis, who have been unsparing in their criticism of Musk (and targets for some of the most unhinged abuse on the site), continue to paint his fence.
Pretending X is a public square. Don’t you need to be logged in to use X and Instagram and most of the time Facebook and Reddit?
They can’t even join BlueSky, let alone mstdn.ca
The article is much more focused on “X bad” than suggesting what politicians should use instead, and as usual the only alternative that’s acknowledged is Bluesky, because moving away from American corporate social media is apparently unimaginable. Just move to a different American site and hope for the best.
It really is fascinating.
The government could literally spin up their own Mastodon instance with minimal investment and management needed.
Only allow new posts from their own accounts, letting federation handle everything else for them. No need to have large moderation teams or anything like what traditional corporate monolithic solutions need.
Unfortunately, governments hate any and all decentralized projects. It’s kind of in the name - central government.
The government could literally spin up their own Mastodon instance with minimal investment and management needed
But then comes the hard part: getting people to use it, especially normal people. Even just getting the politicians on it would be difficult.
As long as you can easily access it from a web site, and not require an app, you might get more engagement.
That’s the perfect solution to me.
Probably something any decent IT team could keep running easily, and the federal government has IT teams.
Avi Lewis at least cross posts on mastadon, I believe he uses mstdn.ca.
When you’re caught in x’s ai lockdown for months and can’t delete your account, it isn’t easy to quit.
